The transformation of the “app”

The true power behind these applications won't be in the devices themselves, but in the analytic systems that back them. The backend systems to applications will need to be able to combine data collected from all sorts of computing devices—be it Google Glass or something like it, a smartphone, an embedded GPS device in a palette, or a sensor in your car's engine. The backend will have to process it and then turn it into information and action. Add technologies like facial recognition built into wearables—for identifying frequent customers, for example, and possibly connecting to their purchase history and other data—and you've got a way to transform the workplace further.

But to pull that off, you need an infrastructure that can play nicely with whatever each participant in the data flow brings to the game. The "app" startup world has driven the rapid evolution of application programming, interface-based architectures that play well with whatever front-end they get wired into. It also dictates how access to the backend data is controlled and metered.

"There are two challenges here," said Harald Collet, the Global Head of Bloomberg Vault, Bloomberg’s Enterprise Information management service. "The first is being able to access the data within the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of existing infrastructure and applications that companies already have. Increasingly, the way forward is to deploy systems with APIs so you can build applications that extract information from multiple systems." Using API-driven approaches is "a way to rationalize the infrastructure" of applications, Collet said, so that it's easier to integrate different elements and deal with changes in how users access the data.

According to Collet, this the second challenge: "how you surface the data on whatever device or application someone wants to use." It could take the form of alerts on a mobile device, the dumping of information to a collaboration space, or integration with analytic and reporting tools. "You can have a risk or compliance user who wants to get an alert on a particular pattern they should be concerned with, correlated with trades and market moving news," Collet said. "It could go to whatever device they want and we'll surface it through whatever applications they want to use. The final form factor is something we're agnostic on. For a corporate IT manager, it will be a challenge because they'll have to develop systems that are platform independent."

Not surprisingly, Michael Mullany, CEO of the HTML5 development tool company Sencha, thinks HTML5 will be the go-to tool for application front-ends in this brave new API-ified world. But he also thinks that it will further drive the adoption of API middleware services such as those offered in the cloud as "backend as a service."

"BYOD and mobile are driving a rethinking of the backend for applications," Mullany said. "There's a been a lot of interest in the mobile 'backend-as-a-service' concept, but I see that becoming an overall backend—and not just for mobile."

Part of the attraction of the backend as a service "gateway" is that it helps deal with the problem of controlling access to applications without having to manage the devices running their front-ends. "Most people believe that mobile device management—the idea that I can ask an employee to hand over his new personal phone, root it, hand it back to them—is not viable," Mullany said. "MDM is the wrong layer to control things." API governance technology (the systems used to govern what applications and devices can gain access to the interfaces of an API) and selecting when to use it is, in the long term, a better solution for handling the security of applications that run on employees' and customers' devices, according to Mullany.

Once you've created an API to connect your business processes and expose data, it can become more than a way to work with employees and customers. It can become an integration point with partners and a way to turn data into a revenue source. "It will drive the need on the backend for API access governance," he said. "How do we disable API access from the backend? The IT department still is the gatekeeper on the backend, but it will be different than the current IT model."

The social enterprise

Like with mobile technology, CIOs will be happy to tell you about how their companies are all over social networking. Yet their achievements are far from the technology's full potential. While companies have leapt upon social networking technology as a marketing tool, few have applied the tools internally.

"The companies that have the best Web presence and social media presence do very little to do that with their own workforce," Nichols said. But that's going to change, he added, as companies decide to apply the social and mobile analytics they've been using to track customers to their own workforce.

That's the sort of change that drove Microsoft to acquire the enterprise social networking tool Yammer. But when Yammer was launched, the concept of a "social enterprise" hadn't really been hammered out, according to Adam Pisoni, the CTO of Yammer and GM of Engineering for Microsoft's Office Division. "When we started Yammer to bring social to the enterprise, even we didn't know what it was," he told me. "We knew that this—enterprise social networking—was happening, but we didn't know what it was for."

The value, it turns out, comes back to creating better collaboration in a form that looks very little like consumer social networks. "Enterprise social" is a tool for destroying the inertia created by corporate organizational charts and CYA e-mail threads.

"We have these org charts that were really designed around predictability," said Pisoni. "But working through them is too slow and not reactive enough. We're increasingly seeing people organizing cross-functionally to accomplish tasks. Instead of working through an org chart, let's bring people together—a group or community, whatever you want to call it—to get that thing done regardless of their affiliation. In a world that is unbelievably unpredictable, we need faster feedback loops. I need to iterate on my idea and see what's going on at edges of the organization faster."

Enterprise social is also about creating transparency for how work gets done. Much like how community software development platforms like SourceForge create a way to expose the whole development process to the scrutiny of peers, enterprise social gives everyone (managers included) a view of how the workflow is going. " The transparency of doing work a little more openly creates accountability," said Pisoni. "IT futurist Thorton May jokes that 'If you're going to walk around with your shirt off, you're more likely to do more sit-ups.' If people can see what you're doing, you're more likely to do a good job."

At some level, enterprise social is an attempt to do what knowledge management tried to achieve in the last decade and failed—to capture the collective knowledge of an organization and pair people who need information and skills with those who have them. "Those systems failed because they were not part of your work," said Pisoni. "For some reason you were going to go add to this knowledge management system on top of everything else you were doing. In successful uses of Yammer, it becomes a way to do your work, not extra. You're already creating content. What if you could do it in a way that made it available to more people?"

While the fundamental tools and technologies in enterprise social are the same, they take on a much different context in the workplace. "In consumer social, I'm interested in the people I know—trying to loosely follow what they're up to," Pisoni said. "In Enterprise social, I'm interested in the information I need, regardless of who has it. In fact, I know the people I know already, so I'm really interested in the people I don't know."

That difference in dynamic also changes how users post content in social enterprise applications. "In consumer social, you just post," said Pisoni. "You don't really care who sees it or when. Enterprise social is driving much more to direct your messages but allowing a broader audience to see it. You need to know that the people you direct it to are going to see it."

In other words, the Yammer vision of enterprise social is a sort of broadcast e-mail. It's directed at a particular audience, but it's searchable and discoverable by coworkers looking for people with information they need. It also creates a sort of transparency for processes that e-mail doesn't.

The Microsoft/Yammer vision of enterprise social may not be the winner in five years. But given the amount of freedom of action it gives employees to collaborate and the amount of direct access it can give management, many companies will undoubtedly wire some form of enterprise social into the fabric of their application. It could become less about "social," and more about instrumenting the workforce—if only so managers can better capture what's going on within the company for analytics and regulatory reasons.

The IT department as integrator

All of these capabilities and the rapidly changing sets of skills required to pull them off will require a change in the role of most companies' IT departments. And that role will increasingly be the one of customer and integrator rather than service provider. This isn't going to be outsourcing in the form it took in the last two decades, Nichols contends. "The historical notions of outsourcing are pretty much done," he said. But the result will be the same—a smaller IT department for most companies with smaller internal data centers and most of the work farmed out to cloud providers.

"IT isn’t going to be able to keep up with the volume of change and data in the future," Nichols said. "What I believe is going to happen is that the IT org is going to help define what the business problem is and help acquire service from someone else. IT will be buying things as a service from a lot of different sources—they’ll define what the key metrics are and then pay someone else to do the analytics and give it back to them as a service."

That shouldn't come as much of a surprise. More and more roles that once belonged to IT have been taken over by others within the company or by service providers. Once upon a time, touching a corporate website required the involvement of someone in the IT department—now, IT just manages the infrastructure and lets the people in marketing handle it, or marketing hires an agency to operate it. Cloud-based infrastructure services like mail, video, and voice communications and collaborative spaces are taking more and more of the daily administrative duties of what used to be IT organization roles. These too are in the hands of service providers.

That doesn't mean an end to in-house IT by any means. But it's clear that the increasing virtualization of every aspect of data center operations—from storage to networking to application services—is going to drive a consolidation of roles within internal IT. The best predictive model for the future may be "DevOps"-oriented organizations like many Web startups and the Obama campaign's technology team. Maybe the future is a small team of engineers and developers continually working to tune the machinery that drives the enterprise forward.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.